Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima

by Naoki Inose, Hiroaki Sato (Translation)

Yukio Mishima (b. 1925) was a brilliant writer and intellectual whose relentless obsession with beauty, purity, and patriotism ended in his astonishing self-disembowelment and decapitation in downtown Tokyo in 1970. Nominated for the Nobel Prize, Mishima was the best-known novelist of his time (works like Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion are still in print in English), and his legacy—his persona —is still honored and puzzled over. Who was Yukio Mishima really? This, the first full biography to appear in English in almost forty years, traces Mishima's trajectory from a sickly boy named Kimitake Hiraoka to a hard-bodied student of martial arts. In detail it examines his family life, the wartime years, and his emergence, then fame, as a writer and advocate for traditional values. Revealed here are all the personalities and conflicts and sometimes petty backbiting that shaped the culture of postwar literary Japan. Working entirely from primary sources and material unavailable to other biographers, author Naoki Inose and translator Hiroaki Sato together have produced a monumental work that covers much new ground in unprecedented depth. Using interviews, social and psychological analysis, and close reading of novels and essays, Persona removes the mask that Mishima so artfully created to disguise his true self. Naoki Inose , currently vice governor of Tokyo, has also written biographies of writers Kikuchi Kan and Osamu Dazai. New York–based Hiroaki Sato is an award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese poetry, and also translated Mishima's novel Silk and Insight .

Genres: Japan, Biography, Nonfiction, History, Japanese Literature, Philosophy, Politics

864 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is comprehensive (want to know which shows he caught whilst in New York?) and not totally enthralled with the fact that he's going to cut his stomach open at the end, which makes a nice change. Sato and Inose seemed happy to challenge some (self-)myths, and without gloating:

"if his first visit to kabuki took place in October 1938, as it was supposed to, Natsuko managed to take him to kabuki only a couple of times before she died."

At times like this it felt like the literary equivalent of doing that *bullshit* cough. Which is what Mishima needs, isn't it? "Hmm. I wonder if I have some homosexual elements in me," he's saying in an interview in 1970.

It could have been a bit more gossipy and I still think we're hiding stuff from Yoko. Or she's hiding stuff from us.

Niggles:
- for £25, I would have expected a few photographs. And ones I haven't seen before.
- Until he publishes new translations, I really feel that Sato must stick with what we have for titles and character's names. So the book is "Runaway Horses" and not "The Runaway Horse", and the character in "The Temple of Dawn" is Ying Chan, not Jin Jan. Etc. OK?


Fun:
"in the vanguard of the Occupation forces, he had famously amazed the gathered reporters with his first question, in Japanese, 'Is Uzaemon doing well?' Virtually no Japanese expected a US military officer to speak Japanese, let alone to be a fan of kabuki."

Mishima really hated Osamu Dazai:
"Mishima pointed to Dazai's insufficient knowledge of the speech and daily customs of aristocratic society when 'The Setting Sun' came out the next year."

Interesting:
"Oshima (Nagisa), it is said, had Mishima in mind as the model of Capt. Yonoi, the young, intense, homosexual, sword-brandishing commandant of the prison camp." I would add that the famous piece of music from "Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence" is called ... (drum roll) ... "Forbidden Colours":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf0HYe...

Funny:
"The first production of 'A Wonder Tale: The Moonbow': 'was curiously amateur. It had lots of technical hitches; heavy objects crashed to the earth backstage; cast not knowing where to stand.'

Morita on Mishima #1:
"Mishima-sensei expressed admiration for my fighting spirit when he saw that my left leg had been broken, the day I arrived, late. Besides, we are both close-cropped and we at once liked each other (am I overstating?)"

Morita on Mishima #2:
"If Mishima doesn't do anything at this late date, I'll kill him."

[Prickle]

The wound Mishima made by disembowelment started 1.6 inches below his navel, 5.5 inches long from left to right, and 1.6 to 2 inches deep. Twenty inches of intestines came out. It was a magnificent seppuku.

Needless to say, not for the casual reader. For anyone who's willing to learn about Mishima's work and “persona”, from his juvenilia to his familial history going back to his great-great grandfather (with a considerable amount of Japanese history thrown in as the author was the former vice governor of Tokyo), I think this book has many unique rewards one won't find in a traditional "Western" style biography. There's as much detail as you could want, but the whole book is quite uniquely framed around the bureaucratic/governmental aspect of Japanese life and Mishima's origins and connections with it. No biography I've ever read has even attempted to approach its subject in that way, and even if not entirely successful still maintains almost experimental asides into this bureaucratic world throughout and shows how it and the literary world are surprisingly overlapped in Japan. Ample tolerance must be made of course for numerous obscure Japanese names popping in and out of the narrative and wide tangents (and tangents upon tangents like Herodotus and Tristram Shandy) into aspects of Japanese culture you didn’t even know existed. What would be the point however in reading a nonfiction book if you're already familiar with everything in it? The discovery is half the fun.

There are several other reasons to recommend this lengthy book, one of my favorites being in how it ferrets out unusual and obscure connections to its subject in Japan's insular 20th century literary world, which are as far as I know completely unremarked on in the current Western Mishima "discourse". At some points it seemed like everyone went to the same university, or were acquainted to each other through esoteric literary societies, or that everyone Mishima met ended up being famous for one reason or another (one of his candidates for marriage went on to be the Empress of Japan for instance!), and even the most tangential people he encountered turned out to be the actress in the excellent movie Woman in the Dunes or just so happened to become host of a popular Japanese travel TV show that aired from 1960-1990 to name just two examples. I would be very surprised if in the course of reading you didn’t look up at least 6 or 7 Japanese authors, books, or movies just because they sounded interesting.

Incidentally, it has always been curious to me that Japan has achieved a larger cultural victory postwar than perhaps than any imperial victory in its history, even the Fall of Singapore. It is folly that they or any country should have once instead measured victories in blood and soil. That’s the long standing paradox that runs straight down through the heart of Mishima and Japan at large I suppose, that such a “civilized” modern nation could have once committed such acts, or that a country of supposed conformists produced such a determined non-conformist like Mishima who, paradoxically, worked very much within the confines of post-war Japan’s literary milieu. The answer to untangling these paradoxes is of course that in every instance it’s more complicated than mere binaries, and a good reason for the book’s length is that it attempts to explore these contradictions and why they are, which is difficult to elucidate in shorter form. Perhaps Mishima put it best when saying that behind a civilized sport like kendo there still remain obvious remnants of Japan’s more primeval warrior society, as evidenced by the almost primal screams let out by the combatants in that sport. They've tried to hastily to paper over these aspects in modern Japan under a glossy consumerist veneer, yet they continue to be an integral part of what made them what they are today. Mishima’s whole literary project can be seen in this light: of exposing not just the Japanese, but the whole of humanity to the dark inner wellsprings of its nature.

This book is certainly not a hagiography. The author(s) are not afraid to call out Mishima on his BS and obvious hypocrisy when merited. Some may feel the editorializing may go too far at times, but I think it's tolerably spaced out and often lends a much needed humorous touch to such a serious person, like quipping "whatever that means" and giving their own interpretation after quoting a particularly obscure and convoluted Mishima passage (which in his worst moments he seemed inordinately fond of writing), or giving extra space to defining Japanese terms like “kokutai (National Polity)” and “taigi (Great Principle)”, before “Mishima would start spouting them with seeming earnestness soon enough”. And I'm not sure if it’s just because of the translation, but for a biography this book used several unusual words which I could only dimly glean from the context. Some of which I could remember were: “muliebrity”, "epigone", “eleemosynary” (I promise you this is the right spelling), “uxorious”, “incrassating”, etc. Just thought this was curious enough to mention as I have rarely had to look up words as frequently when reading modern history books.

I found the opening of this book particularly strong, with a lengthy description of a career bureaucrat distinguished only by his sheer blandness before hitting you with the addendum: “Yukio Mishima could have become this man”. The connection with this bureaucrat is kept up sporadically throughout the book, but I think after a while it might be stretching, since while yes he and Mishima worked together in a governmental position for a small period after the war and were born in the same privileged milieu, Mishima seemed so obviously marked from birth for a literary career. The author(s) rather undercut their own argument by (rightly) spending ten times the space on the literary activities of Mishima's juvenilia than the bureaucratic aspects of it. After all, his entire bureaucratic "career" lasted all of 9 months, making it even more remarkable that the authors should build their entire book around that. While I certainly think the literary and bureaucratic worlds of Japan are more entangled than most, not least because it is well known how "revered" government bureaucrats were in postwar-Japan as an almost quasi replacement for Emperor worship, still the idea of Mishima spending his entire adult life in an office adding up numbers is almost too much to conceive of and not born out by even the authors own evidence (despite what Inose in his own exalted government position might be projecting). It is an interesting "road not taken" for sure, especially considering the very unique plot of Mishima's After the Banquet which I wager will be the first and last book to be so sensitively written about politicians ever again, but I think honestly just as good a book could have been written from the perspective of Mishima potentially becoming a Noh or kabuki actor or Buddhist scholar instead.

This biography does appear to be a collaboration rather than a straight translation of Inose’s original. It’s unclear to which extent each author contributes on any given page, as there’s this one passage which explains some contextual and linguistic point in Confessions of a Mask “that a reader of the English translation may overlook”, which naturally would have been strange to include in the Japanese original. I suspect most of the translator Sato’s original work here involves elucidation on Japanese cultural and linguistic points that could be obscure to English readers. Your mileage may vary though on how useful these asides are, as sometimes they are rather obviously inserted after the fact and break up the text (these sometimes can go on for long enough you forget what the tangent was originally in reference to). They sometimes also explain very basic “Japan for dummies” things I hope anyone as into Mishima to read this 700+ page book should know already, but this is balanced out by the actually useful information they do give which many Japanese may not even know about.

I did not know at all for example that many postwar Japanese authors like Kawabata often used ghostwriters for their novels. One of his ghostwriters was indeed Mishima himself, who in fact likely ghostwrote large portions of The Old Capital, the novella that later won Kawabata a literary prize! The only authors mentioned among the postwar writers that did not use ghostwriters for their own work was Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe. Kawabata of course was still a fine writer and deserved his Nobel in 1968, but seeing that Oe got his later in life, in all likelihood that prize was eventually Mishima’s for the taking as well if not for, well, the harakiri.

There was an interesting note the book made about the South Korean army I wasn’t aware of before either. Many of the top Korean military personnel after WWII were former officers of the Japanese Army and Navy, with former President Park Chung-hee (well known in South Korean history) having been a distinguished graduate of Japan’s Military Academy who fought on the Japanese side in Manchuria. In the years after the war when Korea became more militarized and Japan less, Korean officers couldn’t help twitting that apparently all of Japan’s “bushido” and former military spirit seems to have been transferred to them. It was said however that when Park Chung-Hee heard about Mishima's seppuku, he was said to exclaim “so Bushido isn’t dead in Japan after all!”

In any case, I was also not aware of how incredibly precocious the young Mishima was. Along with a litany of Japanese authors ancient and modern, he not only read but wrote essays on Western authors as diverse as Otto Weininger, Walter Pater, Raymond Radiguet, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, and Guy-Charles Cros, all before the age of 20 mind you.

A strong mark of recommendation for this book is that it made me appreciate many aspects of Confessions of a Mask, the book which established Mishima’s reputation at 24, that I was not aware of when I had somewhat carelessly read it in 2021. The biographical details behind the fictional autobiography were enlightening and elicited some very interesting interpretations to Confessions that I had not considered. These details even illuminated some aspects of his later novel Spring Snow. Namely, was the homosexual aspect of Confessions “put on” or exaggerated in a way to cover for his actual rather heterosexual angst involved in the breaking up of an engagement to a woman he was courting who subsequently married someone else? Certainly the emotions and turmoil involved in a similar situation were described very well fictionally in Spring Snow. But of course it is well known Mishima was indeed homosexual, so what is the mask and what is the reality? In any case, this difficult knot is explored very well in this book with evidence pro and contra, interspersed with relevant detail on how sex has been treated historically in Japanese society and literature, which is not uninstructive to how it is treated today in modern Japan. In either case, from a career perspective, not just literary or personal, Confessions of a Mask was a masterful coup de-theatre, the first of many executed by Mishima at the perfect moment, regardless of which level of “mask” the title refers to.

I very much appreciated how this was full of quotes from Mishima's untranslated nonfiction works. Some are very perceptive in dealing with literature, and some are so wide of the mark that I completely disagree on, such as his quote about the Great Pyramids showing how he likely bought into the Greek and Roman “they were built only by slaves” propaganda. Of course, it was be astonishing to say to Mishima of all people was immune to propaganda.

I liked that the authors are subtle enough to let the reader make up their own mind about things and not lay steer them towards a definitive one-track life. Incidents and passages are quoted, but there’s enough self control here for the authors not to go all “this shows he was gradually becoming more right wing!” as if there was only one possible interpretation for his actions.

An amusing sidebar: only in Japan as late as 1970 could you visit someone for a chat in their house and legitimately worry that if the conversation took a wrong turn there was a danger of you killing each other with swords—as happened when Mishima called on his flakey semi-conspirator Colonel Yamamoto at his house ostentatiously carrying his katana. In return Yamamoto conspicuously revealed his own displayed in a place of prominence in his living room. Of course nothing happened, but this was a scene which even in Mishima’s books might have been too absurd to be believed.

There were no shortage of IRL foreshadowing moments for how Mishima would end his life. Despite copious evidence of his death wish regularly put in print and more than a little hinted at throughout his life, it should still be no surprise that most people he knew thought he would not actually go through with it in the way he did. “That’s just Mishima being flamboyant/a provocateur/LARPing as a samurai/aping Georges Bataille once again!” they must have thought. Would it be too cliche to say that death is a motif than ran all throughout Mishima’s life, especially Mishima’s concept of desiring a “heroic” death before the body decays? This is one of the themes the book most delicately treats with. Especially illuminating is Mishima’s passage in his own words about not wanting to die like Hemingway, who looking for an adventuresome death all his life ended it such a shabby way: seriously ill, verging on dementia, with a shotgun to his head in his basement. Whatever else, Mishima did not die like Hemingway.

The last 2 weeks or so before his death are covered in day-by-day detail and are very well done. All the signs were obvious to those who cared to look, but the daily mundanity of Mishima making visits to his son’s school, or dining with journalists in fancy restaurants, or holdings taidans with Marxist authors, stand in almost tragicomic juxtaposition to him needing to leave every engagement to go into shady hotel rooms with a few other fanatics to plan and launch a military coup.

So as the blurb tantalizingly puts it, behind all the masks and personas, who was Mishima really? One shouldn’t be surprised that after 750 pages, there is still not an easy answer. To me, and it becomes increasingly obvious as the book goes on, he is just a person (like Khrushchev, he loved Disneyland). He had literary talent obviously, but as is made clear by the biography he also worked immensely hard, easily two or three times as hard as his contemporaries as evidenced by his incredibly prolific bibliography, only a portion of which has been translated to English. If he had any primary trait above and beyond the ordinary writer, it was the drive to make a name for himself and a drama/myth/work of art out of his own life (which he took to its ultimate conclusion). It is almost unfortunate for him that in the 20th century there is so much documentary evidence and firsthand accounts about Mishima’s life. Had he lived a hundred years earlier, he would have easily been an almost mythical figure. Well, even as it is I don't think I am alone in thinking he is fast becoming one in certain spaces. Despite the copious myth-busting of this book, his reputation still abounds in modern myths to this day, the Paul Schrader film not being the least among them despite its brutally honest depiction of the coup attempt. It would be a mistake however to make Mishima into a character, especially as the best literary characters in his books can seldom be summarized in a sentence or two. The personas he made and acted out add to his allure, that can’t be denied, but take that all away and I firmly believe his works still stand on their own above and beyond the din of everyday life, for which all lives become pedestrian when examined on a day-to-day basis. Unlike many I still think there may be some value in "printing the legend", but such books as these still should always be valuable, because "who knows? Perhaps they will one day row their way to the truth."

If this review reads disorganized, I apologize as after reading this book a month ago I basically exorcised everything Mishima and Japan from my head (as Kawabata couldn't). Lastly however, I wanted to mention an amusing Mishima quote relating to the whole bodybuilding thing for which he is almost as famous for today as his fiction. Maybe I'm getting too Mishima-pilled but I find myself coming more and more over to his view every day:

Why it is that so many of the Japanese writers are like Dazai Osamu and Akutagawa Ryunosuke who either look neurotic or seem to have just recovered from TB? It's as though they can't write good stories unless they are sick and feeble and those around them approve of it. This is ridiculous. There ought to be a strict line between what you write and how you live. No matter how unquotidian or radical your writing may be, there is no reason for your daily life to be unhealthy or degenerate. Rather, it ought to be healthy.

So go in health, and never cut open your own stomach with a sword.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me almost forever, but finally made it through this. At times, this was a little too comprehensive. Some of the post-war history and the details of kabuki politics I could have done without, but perhaps other readers would be fascinated.

One thing I did learn was how much Mishima was doing besides writing the books we in the west know about: writing letters, forwards, plays, commercial novels etc. And participating in the endless "taidan"— whatever the hell they were.

And that brings us to the impenetrable aspects of this biography. It was not translated but was written in a form of english that is perhaps more familiar to a japanese language speaker. Some sentences were awkward, other made so sense whatsoever. At times I appreciated the glimpse into the japanese mind (as formed by language) and other times I wanted some simple clarity.

Also lots of mistakes and wrong word choices. An airplane pilot is described as "steering" the plane (pilots do a bit more than that). During the final incident, the officer who is tied up watches as the events "enfolded".

However, this is a massive effort. So lots of stars for that.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

An expansive biography of Mishima, the first to appear in nearly forty years, Persona starts by exploring Mishima's ancestry both on his father and mother's sides, as well as telling Mishima's life the book goes into detail of illustrating historic and sociological changes within Japan during his life, which would influence his works and the formation of his thinking.

Where as the authors of the previous biographies of Mishima can relate their personal relationships with Mishima Persona is afforded with more of a detached view which offers the opportunity for some fresh perspectives. There is a larger emphasis on Mishima the playwright, the times he spent in New York are looked at in much detail, also his trips into Europe. The book offers a large and wide scope of cultural references giving a broad contextualization of his times and the literature of his period, his relationship with other writers, Kawabata, Hayashi Fusao and his infamous meeting with Dazai are recounted, and also there's a brief chapter on Mishima's essay on manga, among his favourite artists; Suiho Tagawa and Hiroshi Hirata, (Satsuma Gishiden).

Persona presents us with the details and events of his life that we are familiar with and also supplies many details not given in the previous biographies, his sheer prolificness as a writer is fully illustrated, as well as exploring the writing of his novels and short stories, Persona provides a glimpse into his journalism, as well as to the degrees to which he researched his novels. A biography that will continue to fascinate after many re-readings.

[Graham Wilhauk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a decent biography, but it should have been amazing. Yukio Mishima is one of the most interesting figures in literature, in my honest opinion, and this biography both didn't give enough on one of the halves of him and gave PLENTY of information on the other half of him. The half it did well with was Mishima as an artist and a writer. If this biography promised only the life of Mishima AS A WRITER, than this may be the best biography I have ever read. It goes into detail about his career and his thought process about how his novels were received. I personally loved that part of the book. However, this book failed to do the MAIN thing I was looking for it to do. Showcase the political side of him.

This novel went into the BARE BASICS about the political side of Mishima. It went in depth with it when it correlates with his work, mainly with his story "Patriotism," and his death. However, it BARELY scrapped the surface with his political views, way of thinking, morals, opinions, and extremist actions. That was what I was looking for in this biography and I just got stuff I already knew. I wanted to KNOW Mishima as a man after reading this and I am coming out of this book only knowing him as a writer and not a strong political mind. I am a little bit mad that this book didn't deliver what I wanted, but I am more disappointed more than anything.

In short, "Persona" is far from a great biography. It has great aspects to it. It explains his death in GRIM yet brilliant detail and I got to know more about his career. However, I still feel like a stranger to Mishima the MAN even after reading 750 pages about him. So, I didn't love this. If you are a HARDCORE fan of Mishima and want to know more about his work, than I would recommend this. Everyone else, it isn't worth it.

I am giving this one a 3 out of 5 stars.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally finished reading this fantastic biography of my favorite writer : Yukio Mishima. It would be complicated to do a more complete biography.

[Robert Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important new biography on Mishima.¥

Some quick notes on this encyclopedic tomb:
- The first biography on Mishima in 40 years.
- Incredible sourcing , working of primary documents, interviews, sourcese tc. Almost impossibly well documented covering everything from 1960s Japanese politics, Kabuki theater, gay culture in Japan, classical Indian mysticism, The Yakuza, etc all with reference to Mishima. Probably one of the last centuries most complex figures. The range of his influences and knowledge is absolutely mesmerizing. Thorough to say the least.
- Written by Naoki Inose former Vice Governor of Tokyo - important alone to understand Japan's conservative politics and sources. I wish unlike other biographies there was more reasoning on why Inose was writing this book. There is no personal voice in this biography. Ultimately it will serve as a basis for essays, new thoughts on this complex universal character.

[David DeBacco · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a HUGE read and covers every facet of Yukio Mishima's life. I've not read his entire body of works, but enough to say I'm well versed in his writing - But this book presents everything you will ever need to know about the life and times of Mishima. I feel like I just completed a college class on this author.

[Laurel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most challenging yet rewarding non-fiction books I've ever read. Incredibly comprehensive, both with regards Mishima's own life and the political and cultural worlds around him. Persona is respectful, yet challenges those myths which both sprang up around Mishima and were carefully cultivated by him.

[Bryan Cebulski]

Ahh the journey has reached its end. Despite having a good time with this and finding that it's definitely worth reading for anyone interested in Mishima--or even Japan more broadly in the 20th century--I'm... not sure I got THAT much more out of about Mishima than the John Nathan biography? Which sounds ridiculous because it's a 736 page biography compared to a like 250 page one but, well, Nathan's was more intimate and I felt like I got a better idea of Mishima as a person from it.

Inose's book is endlessly detailed to the point where I lost track of the man through all the factoids, extended analyses of Mishima's work and context-providing passages about Japanese art and politics. Which is stuff I usually adore and ask for more of, but in this case Inose didn't do much to weave it all into a narrative. And there's so much that feels like we're consciously circling around it. For example, I never got a good sense of Mishima's home life--like, his wife Yoko barely even shows up in the book (another reviewer said we're either still hiding things from her, or she's still hiding things from us), and the rest of his family only really shows up for the section on his childhood. Discussion of his sexuality is all there, but weirdly his bodybuilding goes by the wayside. The work unravels as it goes to the point where it feels like bullet points--"This day Mishima did this, the next day Mishima did that." It got so weird and disjointed toward the end, though to be fair Mishima's life did too.

Still, there's some delightful and strange stories in here--like how Mishima learned to drive a tank but not a normal car; or how he was absolutely enchanted by Disney Land; or how he hung out with Christopher Isherwood and Tennessee Williams; or how he was in Arkansas around the time of the Little Rock integration crisis; or how the Nixon campaign managed to run afoul of him because it kicked him out of his hotel in Los Angeles.

The strongest part of the work is that it challenges the myths and self-mythologizing around Mishima, which is much needed. Like I liked that it questioned Mishima's story about how he told Osamu Dazai that he didn't like his fiction, which Nathan lays out as if it were true. But it's not a "complete" picture of the guy, however complete a biography could ever be anyway.

[M.R. Dowsing · Rating 4 out of 5]

This mammoth biography is well-written, insightful and seems to be mostly very well-researched - I say mostly, because I noticed a couple of glaring errors. Namely, the book states that Mishima appeared in a film entitled 'Kill!', directed by Hideo Gosha. The film was actually entitled 'Hitokiri' and was also known as 'Tenchu!', while 'Kill!' is a completely different film directed by Kihachi Okamoto and without Mishima. It is also stated that it was Gosha's first film, whereas it was in fact his eighth.
The book is very long and you get the impression that the authors have included all of their research. I understand the temptation to do this as I have written a biography myself and, in retrospect, I think I was also guilty of including too much research, although hopefully not to this extent. Despite these caveats, most of the content is interesting, and I would say 'Persona' is essential reading for anyone with a deep interest in Mishima or Japan. On the other hand, those with a more casual interest in the author may prefer to read either the John Nathan biography or the Henry Scott-Stokes one.

[Locky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mishima is one of my favourite writers, so when I saw that there was a long biography about him published (or republished) fairly recently, I had to read it.

'Persona' is an extensive - and I mean extensive - look into the entirety of Mishima's life from beginning to end. It also details the historical and sociopolitical aspects of Japan during Mishima's time.

I feel it gives a fair look into what Mishima was about. He was a mighty complex character, but I couldn't recommend this book in good faith to anyone but the most dedicated fans of Mishima. There's simply too much unnecessary information. The book seems like it's 40% about Mishima himself, and 60% about the lives and times of people who had been in contact with him. I don't need the entire publishing history of a magazine that he once read, or who produced and acted in the various plays he saw in NYC.

If you want to understand Mishima, read his works instead, particularly Sun and Steel, Confessions of a Mask and his Sea of Fertility Tetralogy.

[Franger_L · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a millennium to finish this book. Vast details, great understanding and empathy on Mishima make this book a perfect biography. It is such a pity that Sato has not written too much on Modern Noh Plays and Spring Snow. However, he did inspire me a lot on Mishima's view towards Nihilisim and Totalitarianism. It's so good to come back to Goodreads, I've been desperately eager to read comments on Goodreads since China blocked the website.

[Chris Valentine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exhaustively comprehensive, essentially a social history of how and why a Yukio Mishima could come into being as much as it is a biography of the man. Expect to slog through paragraphs of name-drops of Japanese authors, literary/dramatic/artistic movements and journals you probably haven't heard of, as well as various bureaucrats, politicians and government agencies, in order to get to the good, salacious stuff.

[Dmitri Garlic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very gay
Very nihilistic
Very Samurai

[Louis]

At first glance this is a refreshingly chronological biography, but this is not entirely true. While other biographies, written by non-Japanese biographers, open with death and pull back to view the life leading up to it, Inose and Sato open with what Mishima could have become, and go back to investigate why he didn't. A brick I had to rush through at the end (it's an interloan and it's due back tomorrow), exceptionally detailed but still won't justify why no one else has bothered to translate Kyoko's House.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The definitive biography of Mishima in English, by an author who actually knew him, correcting some of the myths about the Japanese author's life and death, and revealing plenty of new information. Highly recommended.

[Karen]

Yukio Mishima (b. 1925) was a brilliant writer and intellectual whose relentless obsession with beauty, purity, and patriotism ended in his astonishing self-disembowelment and decapitation in downtown

[Elsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had to call it a day on this 1000 page doorstopper. While Mishima fascinates me, this was just too much exhaustive detail. Maybe try again after I retire.

[Will E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great biography, check out my review at Three Percent: http://www.rochester.edu/College/tran...

[Kate]

I skimmed a large portion of this book, because I've renewed it 9 times from the library and it needs to go back. Translation a little stilted at times, but genuinely fascinating.